


Upgrade

by TheSupernova



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Gen, Industrialisation, Revolutionary War, Technological Revolution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-18
Updated: 2015-01-18
Packaged: 2018-03-08 01:59:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3191282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSupernova/pseuds/TheSupernova
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As America wanders his ever-changing land, he can't help but feel the change, feel the addiction worsening, can't help but know he is doomed to become nothing more than their machine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Upgrade

Alfred remembered the old days. He remembered when the air wasn’t thick with gas and pollution, wasn’t crowded with sounds and radio waves and _noise_ , everything and anything filling up the spaces between, so nowhere was empty, nothing was silent. He tried to block it out, went insane from the white noise constantly settled at the back of his skull, buzzing inside his ears, prickling behind his eyes-impossible, impossible, unbearable.

It made him want to tear his hair out. It made him want to scream and cry and shout and all he could do was bang his fists uselessly on the door, the walls, the floor, and clutch his head in his hands as it got worse, got louder and more insistent and brought him to his knees and never stopped, never ceased or faltered just continued insistently.

They all noticed the change in him. How could they not, with the bags under his eyes from not sleeping in days and the weight he’d lost from not eating. Alfred, the nation they’d all once called fat, barely able to keep his food down, not just because of the sound still slowly invading his mind, but because of the knowledge, because of all the things he heard and saw and witnessed, everything that was being kept from his people, things they would never agree to, things that went against the freedom he’d once so proudly boasted and possessed. It rotted his very core, it was a poison within him that slowly ate at his very being.

He couldn’t keep this up. It hurt, it didn’t used to hurt so why now was there pain, like something eating away at his very personality, like someone was taking everything that made him who he was and ripping it away from him, piece by piece, for the ‘good’ of him and his people? Alfred had never felt so useless as he was now, standing so completely submissive before his boss as he was told for the millionth time that they couldn’t simply stop, that this was the future and the people would never allow it, there would be riots in the streets and people wouldn’t be safe because how would anybody enforce any kinds of laws without the technology they now possessed?

And Alfred would go home and secretly smash his phone to bits, and wander the streets trying to destroy the transmissions and signals, ripping down telephone lines and satellite dishes, just trying to destroy the technology that had made him into this monster of war and destruction, this suspicious, paranoid _thing_ that he was now. He wasn’t a nation anymore. Nations had control of themselves. Nations trusted their citizens and nations didn’t lie and they were more than just metal wires running from coast to coast, border to border. They were land, not technology.

He yearned for the times when he’d been truly free. Yes there had been wars, when he’d fought for independence and hurt Arthur more deeply than he could have imagined or used the world as his stomping ground just to prove his worth, back when he was still young and reckless and made enemies just by trying to grow up, grow bigger. He longed to go riding horseback across open plains and lie under clear, starry skies, watching time pass with the changing of the moon and not constantly worrying about the ever-worsening pain in his skull that felt as though it would explode at any second, consuming him and leaving behind nothing more than a shell, a hollow, empty creature made of metal and power and noise.

America wasn’t a nation anymore. It was a machine.

**Author's Note:**

> So I'm not American. In fact I'm Australian, so I probably got at least half of this wrong and it may be completely incomprehensible to anybody even resembling an actual American. But it wasn't my intention to offend anyone, so I'm incredibly sorry if this did!
> 
> This fic was really just a way of me portraying Alfred's difficulty with coming to terms with the new era of technology, and being unable to give up the freedom he'd possessed as a younger nation.


End file.
